What happens when you have a quiet moment to yourself, without distraction? If being left alone with just your thoughts for company sounds like hell, then you are not alone. Some people even prefer an electric shock to a spot of quiet reflection.
Researchers at the Universities of Virginia and Harvard recruited hundreds of volunteers (first undergraduates, then people of all ages from the local community) to take part in ‘thinking periods.’ For 15 minutes the team left participants alone in a lab room to think about whatever they liked. The only alternative was to push a button and give themselves a mild electric shock. Even though all participants had previously stated that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity (to weed out the wierdos I guess), 67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict an electric shock on themselves. One man gave himself a shock 190 times. Even working parents – who you’d assume would be desperate for a bit of peace – pressed the shock button.
When the time was up, most people said they didn’t enjoy the experience. Of the people who didn’t shock themselves, those who scored higher on ‘agreeableness’ were more likely to enjoy the experiment if they were given a specific topic to think about.
These experiments were in 2014. If people couldn’t be left to their own devices back then, now we are never without our actual devices. Who doesn’t scroll through their phone when they have a free moment, rather than let their thoughts wander off? We have got even further out of the habit of stilling our racing minds.
Why does this matter?
It shows that we have a constant urge to do something rather than nothing at all. That’s a good thing, right? What’s wrong with workers who prefer to be busy?
Busy workers aren’t effective workers. They are victims of the urgency effect, where we do what’s urgent and screaming out in front of us (often responding to emails, over 300 billion of them are sent every single day), rather than doing what’s actually important. ‘Important’ means moving us closer to achieving our priorities, not completing bureaucratic or low-value tasks that suck up our time but have no significant impact on our team, business, customers or career.
The philosopher John Dewey, quoted in Derek Draper’s book Create Space, said that:
‘we do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting from experience.’
If we don’t make space to pause and reflect, to surface our blind-spots, or challenge our assumptions and build self-awareness, then we’ll keep on ploughing the path that we’ve always done.
What’s the point of a mindfulness session once a week if you work mindlessly for the rest of it?
Taking time to reflect like this is proven to increase productivity. Other Harvard researchers (I bet they were disappointed that no electric shocks were involved) found that when people added fifteen minutes of reflection into the end of their working day – rather than working for that fifteen minutes – their productivity increased by nearly a quarter in just ten days. That spike remained when reassessed a month later. The researchers concluded that getting more done was less effective than reflecting on the work they had already done. Have you scheduled your planning time?
Put your phone away and pause. Instead of reacting to everything around you, get back to the big questions. Why am I doing this? Where do I add the most value? What difference can I really make? What’s working well? Where should I focus next? What could de-rail me? Better still, hire a coach to facilitate your reflection. (Electric shocks are an optional extra).